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Being an information professional by trade, it is interesting to keep an eye out for new developments in the pipeline for two diseases of which I know a bit: schizophrenia and depression.

I recently went to dialog ( http://www.dialog.com) and did a search on neuroleptics and antidepressive agents in all phases of the development cycle. This includes drugs in pre-registration, pre-clinical, phase I, phase II, and phase III clinical trials. In other words, I looked for drugs in all stages of development that will treat schizophrenia and related disorders and depression and related disorders. These drugs in the pipeline ranged from very early in the development process to drugs that are almost potentially approved. I searched the three major databases for this type of information: Adis R&D Insight, IMS World R&D Focus, and Pharmaprojects, and I couldn't believe how many hits I got for the schizophrenia drugs: 304 discrete hits. There were even more hits for antidepressive drugs: 437. One theory I have is that the more hits a condition produces the better the chances are that a good drug will come out of the research because of all the energy going into the research.

The pipelines for schizophrenia and depression are ablaze with activity! However, I couldn't remove duplicates from the three databases. This means to get a more realistic idea of how many drugs are in the development cycle for each disorder one would divide the number of hits by about three because the hits came from three databases. So, to be accurate there are fewer compounds in development than the number of hits would lead you to believe: about 101 drugs for schizophrenia and about 145 drugs are in the pipeline for depression.

To give an idea of how explosive this growth in drugs for mental disorders is, I chose cardiac health as a comparative field. Cardiac antiarrythmic drugs are very important, and lucrative. However, there were only 207 hits for antiarrythmic drugs. The comparison between psychiatric drugs and this one type of cardiac drug is worth noting because it shows the health of the pipelines for schizophrenia and depression.

The fact that this pipeline exists and is bustling with activity is a reason for hope for many of us whose treatment is less than ideal. In theory, as time goes on the drugs get more fine tuned. Let's hope they find cures for the various mental illnesses someday. So, some fine day mental illness will be a thing of the past only read about in history books as part of the story of the advancement of our global society.